£390m UK Government push for hydrogen and low carbon tech

From using hydrogen to produce sustainable gin to mounting electrolysers onto floating wind turbine platforms to produce hydrogen, these are just two projects boosted today by a share of £390m UK Government funding in a bid to tackle industrial emissions.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) today awarded thirteen hydrogen supply projects £20m to undertake feasibility studies and a further seven projects £20m to explore how industrial fuels can be switched by hydrogen.

The 20 projects will explore how the use of hydrogen can be rolled out across the UK – a crucial step towards the end of the UK’s contribution to global warming.

The best of these will be awarded up to £7.5m to move their technologies towards commercialisation.

The remainder of the funding has been split between a competition to enable greater supply of low carbon hydrogen for use across the economy to help businesses decarbonise (£100m) and a Clean Steel Fund to support the iron and steel industry, which accounts for 15% of industry emissions, to transition to a low carbon future, including hydrogen (£250m).

Climate Change Minister Lord Duncan said, “Developing hydrogen technology has the potential to not only reduce emissions from industry, but could also help us seize the opportunities of the global shift to cleaner economies – with the prize of up two million jobs and £170bn of annual exports by 2030.

HySpirits

The HySpirits project has been awarded nearly £150,000 to explore the possibility of converting a craft gin distillery in Orkney in Scotland from using liquid petroleum gas – currently used in gas barbecues and outdoor heaters – to hydrogen to make the process more environmentally friendly.

Working with the European Marine Energy Centre’s plant – which uses wind and tidal technology to produce hydrogen – the HySpirits project would use this locally-produced ‘green’ hydrogen to supply zero-carbon heat for the gin distillation process.

If successful, this would reduce emissions from the plant by around 86 tonnes of CO2 every year – the equivalent annual emissions from 10 homes or 18 cars – and show how the UK’s growing craft brewing industry can switch from using fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives.

Dolphyn

A project aiming to use floating wind turbines to produce hydrogen has been awarded £428,000.

The Dolphyn project will mount electrolysers – electrical devices to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – onto platforms to produce hydrogen. One wind turbine alone has the potential to produce enough low carbon hydrogen to heat around 2,500 homes, fuel over 120 to 240 buses, or run eight to 12 trains.

Gigastack

ITM Power, Ørsted and Element Energy have received £500,000 for the Gigastack project, which aims to demonstrate the delivery of bulk, low-cost and zero-carbon hydrogen through gigawatt scale polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolysis.

The project aims to dramatically reduce the cost of electrolytic hydrogen through:

Development of a new 5MW stack module design to reduce material costs

A new semi-automated manufacturing facility with an electrolyser capacity of up to c. 1GW/year to increase throughput and decrease labour costs

Deployment of very large scale and hence low cost 100MW+ electrolyser systems using multiple 5MW units

Innovations in the siting and operation of these large electrolysers to exploit synergies with large GW scale renewable energy deployments.